By João Paulo Meneses


The spectre of pacapio


1847-2017: it has been 170 years since gambling was legalised in Macau. But it has not been easy to pin down the right date…


and diversify its leading economic activities, Macau’s Portuguese Government legalised gaming for the first time in 1847. By the 1850s, more than two hundred ‘Fantan’ stalls were operating in Macau,’ we can read on Macau’s Gaming Inspection and Co-ordination Bureau website.


‘A 18 SEPTEMBER 2017 This information is only partially correct, but


essentially places the date gaming became legal in Macau. Incredible as it may seem, clarification about the


year of creation of the model that still inspires the activity of gambling in Macau only surfaced this


fter Hong Kong’s sovereignty was ceded to the British in 1842, Macau’s role as an important trading port was gradually replaced by Hong Kong. In an effort to fill its depleted coffers


century.


Behind it innumerable historical books are inaccurate, incomplete or omit this seminal moment. It would be easy, therefore – but also tiresome – to


cite dozens of examples; but these two show well enough what is happening: ‘to support Timor [then a Portuguese colony], and to assure Macau a measure of internal financial stability, [Governor] Guimarães now introduced what [was to] become the most widely known feature of contemporary Macau – licensed gambling,’ wrote Austin Coates in A Macao Narrative (1978). The problem is that Governor Guimarães only assumed office in Macau in 1951… This remarkable work of Coates inspired many


authors, which also means that the error was perpetuated by other books.


One of them, and one of the most important


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